Dear Secret Soccer Analyst
I have four apologies to make to you.
First, I am sorry I missed your post when you first published it. Fortunately, Richard Whittall, Rob Carroll and Darrell Cobner alerted me to your story.
When I last looked Richard’s tweet had received 918 likes and 255 retweets. Martin Bucheit’s tweet about your post has 19 likes.
Your open sharing has touched many people. I am late to the party but am touched too. Profoundly so.
I have been involved in the analysis of performance since the late 1970s.
In the 1990s, I worked as a performance analyst in rugby union. For most of the decade, I had intense work periods that during competition and overseas tours extended to 18 hour days … week after week.
It was an analogue video world. I was fortunate to have access to host broadcast videos and captured my own game video with the help of colleagues. We thought we had hit the jackpot with S-VHS format.
I have a second apology to make.
When I started the Centre for Notational Analysis in Cardiff in 1991, I hoped to create a career path for young people interested in performance analysis. We were at the start of a movement that has positioned you to feel the way you do.
I am staggered by the creativity of people like yourself. The world you occupy is a quantum shift from the occupational culture of the 1990s.
We do share the same vision though … to provide an invisible service to coaches that records, analyses and potentially transforms performance.
My third apology is that despite my advocacy for performance analysis as a service, I have had limited success in persuading clubs and sporting organisations that our work should be valued rather than priced.
Young people are still inducted into performance analysis as unpaid interns or lowly paid analysts. We are encouraged to believe that the status of being connected with a club or team ‘compensates’ for zero or low wages.
Some learning organisations are pro-actice and make every effort to support their analysts financially and through continuing learning opportunities.
Our dilemma is that we have so many people wanting to be analysts and often have the experiences you have.
My fourth apology is to lament that I have not been able to gain acceptance for two fundamental questions:
What is so important we have to share it?
Can less be more?
At the heart of this conversation is a profound debate about frequent augmented information. The availability of hardware and software has led to a surfeit of options for each analyst.
It has created an insatiability that we as a profession must address. We either need more people or automation to help us or we use the two questions above and add two more:
What has changed in performance in training and competition?
How might feedforward transform our practice?
Much of my time now is spent in exhorting our community of practice to share experiences openly. Your post is a very important marker in our conversation about practice and reminded me of that quote in Shadowlands …
We read to know we are not alone.
Now that you have shared your thoughts, I hope you realise that you have a world of friends who are just a phone call or email away.
I hope too you will accept my apologies.
Keith
Photo Credits
Training day in 38C heat (Keith Lyons, CC BY 4.0)
